Microsoft is trying to [ersuade politicians to take out targeted ads on Xbox Live, Skype, MSN and other company platforms as midterm elections begin heating up around the country. To plug the idea, Microsoft officials handed out promotional materials Thursday at CPAC, the annual conference for conservatives.It's the latest move by tech companies to seize a piece of the lucrative political ad market. The ads, which would appear on the Xbox Live dashboard and other Microsoft products, combine Microsoft user IDs and other public data to build a profile of Xbox users. Campaigns can then blast ads to selected demographic categories, or to specific congressional districts. And if the campaign brings its own list of voter e-mail addresses, Microsoft can match the additional data with individual customer accounts for even more accurate voter targeting.http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/07/microsoft-is-using-your-data-to-target-political-ads-on-xbox-live/

$micro$oft: you suck donkey balls. if i want to watch political ads id like to see all sides so i can pick for myself a candidate that suits me. by targeting ads,i will only see the one you (yes you $micro$oft) think i want to see. its not fair to the candidates, and certainly not fair to me.

let me re-iterate: $micro$oft : you suck more than george noory and the lifetime channel combined. you are to that as noory is to art bell.

political ads are largely, to me, a waste because they're always an extreeeemely one-sided viewpoint extracted from a careful manipulation of data. i'd rather just have the raw data and come up with a conclusion for myself.

microsoft adding these kind of ads will be annoying at first, but something i'll ultimately tune out.

it IS kind of disturbing though, to think that some other people might be influenced to vote for a candidate just because his/her/its campaign dropped some dollars to M$FT. and microsoft would probably push harder towards certain candidates who may be more in line with their agenda.